D&D General Ben Riggs interviews Fred Hicks and Cam Banks, then shares WotC sales data.

[Reynard]

It’s a nice familiar place for people to find and re-find and spread the hobby.

It also in no way stifles innovation in this hobby. In fact I might argue that it encourages it.

As always, there is a LOT of "having your cake and eating it too" in this thread. What WotC does doesn't matter, at the same time that it is super important that D&D matters. Etc. No one plays or buys other games (relative to the numbers that play D&D), but at the same time innovation is from other companies. It is just dancing around.

And to reiterate: all I said is I want an actual new edition of D&D because 5E has been around for 10+ years and (for me) is old and boring and I WANT the official D&D to be the game I want to play. That's all.

 

[Dire Bare]

I am not sure how a complete lack of innovation in the industry leader could be good.

Complete lack of innovation? Okay.

 

[darjr]

Doesn't encourage WotC to innovate and several of the biggest companies and ENworld essentially make knock offs.

Daggerheart, Shadowdwrk, even A5E is much more than a knockoff!

H*ck even Dungeon World 2 is coming!

Mothership and Mörk Borg and Epic Bastionland and Drawsteel and etc etc.

Finally we are in a place where we have steady, even strong, growth in the hobby with a big corp that finally understanding (maybe) that it’s a bad idea to meddle in the ttrpg. Without the chaos and edition wars and incompatibility and new user confusion.

Can we just ride this one for a while?

 

[Reynard]

Can we just ride this one for a while?

We have been. For years.

 

[Hussar]

To reinforce that, recently Civ VII was a fairly big departure from CiV VI and the reception was lukewarm to say the least.

I mean, sure. You can look at pretty much any franchise game. Maybe not every time, I'm sure that exceptions exist, but, by and large, you don't get huge changes from version to version. Halo is coming out with a new version - Halo:Campaign Evolved. I haven't picked it up yet. Haven't looked at it at all. But, I'm pretty sure it's going to be a FPS with WASD controls. There'll be some new goodies, but, other than looking a lot prettier, it probably won't be all that different from the original Halo which came out twenty years ago.

Anyone shocked about the direction of WotC and D&D hasn't been paying attention. They have never hidden the fact that this is the version of D&D they want to keep using for a very, very long time. That's what evergreen means. It means that someone could go into a used bookstore, pick up any old 5e book and use it today without any real issue. They are not obsoleting anything. You want to use Hoard of the Dragon Queen with whatever D&D version is out in 2032? Go right ahead. It will work.

 

[SlyFlourish]

What game benefits from the network effects of having a brand name and a very large pool of players precisely because of that brand name is very much a function of brand recognition alone.

That isn't really up to us, though, is it? Not only do we have almost zero control over Hasbro's decisions with the future of D&D but given some of the whackadoodle ideas of what the next edition of D&D should be I've heard, I wouldn't count on its success if we did have control over it.

 

[SlyFlourish]

D&D, the Kleenex of RPGs.

I always say "D&D" when I really mean Shadowdark or OSE etc.

I go back and forth on whether this is good or bad for the hobby but I'm happy with my little logic gates in my head. If I'm talking to someone outside the hobby, it's all D&D or "like D&D". If it's inside the hobby, I talk specific system names.

 

[Lanefan]

Hang on, let me find my old drum in the closet. Here it is! bangbangbang.

There are tons of awesome RPGs being designed by tons of awesome designers, many of whom worked at WOTC on previous versions of D&D, we can enjoy instead of worrying about what a new edition of D&D would be like (hint, it won't be what you want).

My recommendations which I think span a huge range of RPG playstyles and are still D&Dish:

• Shadowdark
• Daggerheart
• Dolmenwood
• 13th Age
• Old School Essentials
• Draw Steel
• Shadow of the Weird Wizard
• Dragonbane

There's eight and I could keep going...

Which is fine, but - like it or not - the player-base of all those games in aggregate is a rounding error in comparison to that of D&D itself. They're a non-factor.

Even the shift to 2024 is splitting up the base I think. At the 5e panel I hosted at Gencon, roughly half the audience was using D&D 2024 and half stuck to D&D 2014.

One thing I think WotC might have got right here is that because it's a relatively small shift from 5e to 5.5e the adoption will come gradually over time rather than all at once. I don't think it's splitting the player-base (other than some hard-cores on forums like this one) in any egregious manner.

As for WotC, a bunch of tables jumped to 5.5e right away but not all did, meaning there's a built-in cadre of potential customers still out there playing 5e who will likely make the switch somewhere down the road, in addition to those coming in brand new. End result - the medium-term outlook for 5.5e sales is pretty good, all things considered.

 

[Dire Bare]

To reinforce that, recently Civ VII was a fairly big departure from CiV VI and the reception was lukewarm to say the least.

Well, innovation doesn't always mean "better", it just means "different".

But on the balance, innovation is a good thing. Pushes design forward, even if not every change is a hit.

But not everything needs to be innovative, or wildly innovative. D&D 2024 is an innovative game and makes changes to the 2014 rules. It's not as innovative as it could have perhaps been, we didn't get a "6th Edition".

But there is plenty of innovation within the official game from WotC. And even more innovation from the gaming community outside WotC. We live in one of the most innovative times for tabletop RPGs.

But yeah, Civ VII went over like a lead balloon on Jupiter. I was bummed with that innovation myself. But I don't know, maybe some fans loved the new game or it brought in new fans?

 

[SlyFlourish]

4E was someone's first edition and someone's favorite edition, and they aren't always the same people.

Yep! All two of them =)

According to Ben Riggs, it was so bad Hasbro considered selling D&D off.

You're obviously free to love the brand all you want. I think that love is misplaced and I'd warn others against putting so much emotional connection to a brand owned by a multi-billion-dollar publicly traded company who might just sell it to the Saudi public investment fund to make a new mobile game out of it.